Washington
D.C.’s new streetcar line “was ill-planned, ill-thought-out, ill-engineered,
ill-everything,” recently deceased former Mayor Marion Barry said in 2014. There
have been minor accidents, constant engineering problems, and the system has
missed its targeted opening date by more than three years. Perhaps D.C. planners
never would have embarked on this folly if only they had studied the long and
turbulent history of street cars in the city.
For about a hundred years,
these surface-level rail cars crisscrossed the capital. Although they they were
an important technology in their time, street cars involved major engineering
headaches and they required an enormous amount of capital investment and
maintenance. Contrary to the myth peddled by transit nostalgics, when streetcars
finally disappeared from the district in 1962, the public collectively breathed
a sigh of relief.
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